The City of Edinburgh will be the first to host an international promotion event of Rotterdam's innovative cultural policies for enforcing the participation of artists in heightening a city's competitiveness and securing social peace on the local level.

The essay 'Neo-Liberalism with Dutch Characteristics: The Big Fix-Up of the Netherlands and the Practice of Embedded Cultural Activism' is published in the book volume 'Culture and Contestation in the New Century'.

Read more about the Kanunnik Triest Square (designed by architects De Vylder Vinck Taillieu) in the Caritas psychiatric centre (Melle) and how it results from a participative process with psychiatrists, managers, staff, and patients.

The question to what extent urban interferences influence social behavior has been much debated ever since urban planning was considered a profession. This matter of influence gets increasingly interesting once specific political dilemmas are being solved through urban planning, or rather: are a consequence thereof. How can urban planning facilitate political inequality, and to what extent can algorithms or even concrete play a role in moral questions?

Aside from physical architecture, there’s a potentially even more complex territory to explore. Our social and professional behaviour is increasingly taking place in virtual environments. Behind the screens of our computers lays a world of predetermined constructions, restrictions and fantasy. How abstract is this world?

In Architectures of Exclusion, the relations between politics, morality, urban and virtual interferences will be investigated.

Three guests will give a presentation of their approach to these matters. Gideon Boie studied architecture and philosophy in Ghent and Rotterdam and is one of the heads of BAVO, an independent research and activism office focused on the political dimension of art, architecture and planning.

Architecture theorist Edwin Gardner is currently working as a fellow researcher at the Jan van Eyck Academy Maastricht. His research is about design cognition and diagrammatic reasoning and how these modes of thinking relate to increasingly algorithmic and cybernetic ways of interacting with the city.

Juha van ‘t Zelfde is an independent researcher, writer, musician and curator. He’s part of VURB, a European framework for policy and design research concerning urban computational systems.